3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item The influence of interpersonal skills of IS leaders on IS employee job satisfaction(2018) Aboobaker, YusufInformation system/technology (IS/T) leaders require varied skills to drive performance and satisfaction of IS/T employees within their departments. One way posited to increase job satisfaction of employees is by changing the characteristics of the workplace about which employees form attitudes. One such set of characteristics on which attitudes are formed is the interpersonal skills of the supervisor themselves. Generally, IS/T leaders have often been criticised as being poor communicators often with stronger technical than social skills. More research into the importance of interpersonal skills among IS/T leaders is needed. But what exactly are the interpersonal skills of supervisors and can they really affect the job satisfaction of others? The purpose of this research was to answer the above question by specifically preparing an inventory of interpersonal skills and draw on past theories to develop and subsequently test a model of the relationship between employee perceptions of their immediate IS/T leader’s interpersonal skills and their job satisfaction. Specifically, the study hypothesised that the interpersonal skills of IS/T supervisors influences the job satisfaction of the IS/T employee supervised in the presence of commonly known predicators of job satisfaction. The study employed a deductive, relational design. Data was collected using a survey methodology and employed a structured questionnaire instrument. The sample consisted of 82 IS/T departmental employees from South African organisations in which a permanent IS/T leader heads up the department. Bivariate analysis was performed, and measures were tested for reliability and validity prior to testing the hypothesised model. The model was tested using regression techniques. Results show that interpersonal skill of IS/T leaders significantly influence job satisfaction of IS/T employees, albeit only the sub elements of peer leadership skills and relationship building skills of supervisor’s influence employee job satisfaction. The combined effect of interpersonal skills over commonly known predicators is not significant, however peer leadership skills is. The originality and contribution of this research to IS/T literature takes the form of contribution by espousing the descriptions of interpersonal skills and furthering the iii understanding of what role perceived interpersonal skills of supervisors can play in creating an effective IS/T department through satisfied employees. The practical implications of the study may influence educators, students and recruiters to respectively understand, teach, learn and test for interpersonal skills. IS/T supervisors may also work on elements of those skills found lacking in their behavioural repertoire.Item The influence of infrastructure flexibility on the relationship between innovative capability, human and growth : a study of high technology business in Gauteng(2017) Mothopeng, NeoThe ‘innovation imperative’ - a salient demand on organisations to outclass their competitors in services rendered, products generated, as well as the channels of delivery - or face elimination, is a motivator behind the level of competitiveness in today’s global economy. As a result, innovation and the advent of technology has been a central and wide-ranging theme in academic research. In the recent past, business growth has been attributed to the mere development of Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. Contrary to that notion though, more and more authors are referring to the flexibility of IT infrastructure as a cornerstone for optimal business operations and a response mechanism to changing organizational needs (MacKinnon, Grant, & Cray, 2008). Given the failure of the formal and public sector to absorb the growing number of job seekers in South Africa, increasing attention has focused on growth enterprises and their potential for contributing to economic growth, job creation and innovation (Herrington et al., 2009). The researcher sampled firms occupying the high technology spaces within Johannesburg as Information Communication Technology (ICTs) have permeated every facet of the contemporary organisations’ value chain, thus generating an automated grid of interrelated applications and information for business processes (Kohli & Melville, 2009). The study found that operational firm performance would improve if organisations were to make investments in IT infrastructure flexibility and exploit the human capital and innovative capability at their disposalItem Accelerating decision making under partial observability using learned action priors(2017) Mabena, NtokozoPartially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide a principled mathematical framework allowing a robot to reason about the consequences of actions and observations with respect to the agent's limited perception of its environment. They allow an agent to plan and act optimally in uncertain environments. Although they have been successfully applied to various robotic tasks, they are infamous for their high computational cost. This thesis demonstrates the use of knowledge transfer, learned from previous experiences, to accelerate the learning of POMDP tasks. We propose that in order for an agent to learn to solve these tasks quicker, it must be able to generalise from past behaviours and transfer knowledge, learned from solving multiple tasks, between di erent circumstances. We present a method for accelerating this learning process by learning the statistics of action choices over the lifetime of an agent, known as action priors. Action priors specify the usefulness of actions in situations and allow us to bias exploration, which in turn improves the performance of the learning process. Using navigation domains, we study the degree to which transferring knowledge between tasks in this way results in a considerable speed up in solution times. This thesis therefore makes the following contributions. We provide an algorithm for learning action priors from a set of approximately optimal value functions and two approaches with which a prior knowledge over actions can be used in a POMDP context. As such, we show that considerable gains in speed can be achieved in learning subsequent tasks using prior knowledge rather than learning from scratch. Learning with action priors can particularly be useful in reducing the cost of exploration in the early stages of the learning process as the priors can act as mechanism that allows the agent to select more useful actions given particular circumstances. Thus, we demonstrate how the initial losses associated with unguided exploration can be alleviated through the use of action priors which allow for safer exploration. Additionally, we illustrate that action priors can also improve the computation speeds of learning feasible policies in a shorter period of time.Item Barriers to information and communication technology (ICT) adoption and use amongst SMEs: a study of the South African manufacturing sector(2016) Pillay, PriyalThis paper aims to look at the barriers of ICT adoption amongst Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in South Africa, specifically in the high growth-manufacturing sector. The population of the study is comprised of manufacturing SME owners and managers in Gauteng, South Africa. The objectives of this study are threefold. Firstly, it aims to establish which ICTs SMEs are currently making use of in South Africa. Secondly, it will analyse the perceived value added to SMEs through ICT adoption. And thirdly, the study endeavours to unearth the various barriers faced by SMEs when adopting ICTs. The research consists of data collection from 81 SMEs in the manufacturing sector in Gauteng, South Africa, by means of an online questionnaire. The data was analysed through a variety of statistical techniques covering both descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis. The following conclusions were reached: Three barriers examined are significantly important to the adoption of ICTs, namely lack of existing hardware, immediate return on investment (ROI), and lack of infrastructure. The perceived value of ICT has a positive, significant relationship to ICT adoption. The majority of SMEs still predominantly make use of general ICTs, with more advanced ICT use lagging behind significantly. The majority of respondents have Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone services (69%), Internet access and e-mail (90%), as well as telephone (89%) and fax (82%) services as ICTs that have already been implemented. The education level of the owner/manager has a significant, positive relationship with the level of ICT adoption, particularly amongst general-use ICT and production- integrating ICT.Item Is there a relationship between TQM practices and service quality in the restaurant industry(2016) Raciti, AnndronikiThis dissertation aims to identify whether or not there is clear and tangible evidence to suggest a relationship between the presence of total quality management (TQM) practices and service quality in the restaurant industry. It attempts to investigate if restaurants that show higher levels of service quality do so because they implement quality management practices in some form or another. The study considers four restaurants in Johannesburg. A research method was devised purely for this dissertation to measure the presence of quality management practices within the restaurant and the level of service quality experienced by the customer. Three research instruments were designed for the study by using various frameworks, specifically TQM (a type of quality management practice), the SERVQUAL instrument (a tool used to measure service quality) and qualitative research interviewing. Quality management practices at the restaurants were assessed using the first research instrument: The TQM Questionnaire, which was conducted as an interview between researcher and restaurant employees. The level of service quality was assessed using the second research instrument: The Customer Survey, which was dispensed to the restaurant customers. The third instrument, an observations table was used to corroborate the results obtained by the first two instruments and was designed by the researcher. The results of the TQM Questionnaire were analysed using content analysis, and each restaurant was assigned a total TQM score, which signified the degree to which they implement TQM practices. These scores were compared to the results obtained from the customer surveys, which assigned each restaurant with a SERVQUAL score that measured the degree of customer satisfaction. The TQM results were compared to the SERVQUAL results for each restaurant in order to identify a relationship between the two aspects. The research identified that 3 of the 4 restaurants showed a clear relationship between the presence of TQM practices in their operations and the level of service quality experienced by the customer. It was identified that restaurants that achieved high TQM scores also achieved the highest SERVQUAL scores. This finding recognises that there is a relationship between TQM and service quality, however the study does not go forward to investigate the nature of this relationship.